


He Built a Home in My Heart

by Kanthia



Series: Life Goes On [3]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 18:53:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20232688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: Here’s the thing about dating Gohan: you kind of have to accept that all sorts of random things are connected, with Gohan and his family at the centre.(Gohan takes Videl to the Lookout to share a meal with some old friends.)





	He Built a Home in My Heart

Nobody goes to high school thinking they’ll meet their spouse. You don’t watch someone go through puberty and think to yourself _yeah, I think that’s the one _\-- not when everyone’s squeaky and sweaty and acne-prone. Sure, maybe you decide you’re going to try a bit of Tab A, Slot B to see what all the fuss is about, and maybe you even decide you like it with one specific person; Videl had been with Sharpner right through that phase, and impressed herself with how amicable the breakup had been.

\-- Well, maybe that was a Videl issue and not a high school issue. There had, after all, been a significant change to her social status after the Cell Games, and after that she’d kind of resigned herself to marriage to some half-wit wrestler or politician arranged by her father.

So: Gohan struts in and immediately distinguishes himself as a nerd’s nerd. Terrific at algebra and chemistry and plant identification, crap at contemporary history, drives their compositions teacher nuts with his adorably outdated spelling which, according to said teacher, suggests he was raised by bears in the mountains. And he’d blush and smile and rub the back of his head, embarrassed, with that easygoing affect that Videl found really, _really_ annoying. So annoying that she couldn’t stop watching him, which became significantly harder once word got out that --

“-- Gohan’s _jacked_,” Erasa says reverently, one afternoon after school. “Saw him coming out of the change room after gym class, still putting on his shirt -- I thought I was hallucinating, swear to God.”

Yeah, he’s jacked, as Videl confirmed a few months later, after a romance so whirlwind it had happened entirely without her knowledge, didn’t realize what had happened until she was sitting in the barber’s chair because he’d mentioned he liked the thought of her with short hair. She’d had this moment, where she’d thought _oh, fuck, I really like this guy_; which was immediately followed by the thought _oh, shit, Dad’s gonna kill him_, and the fact that those two thoughts were not in the opposite order told her that this was a good thing to keep at.

She’d been _entirely unaware_, however, that the simple act of insisting he join the World Martial Arts tournament would spark such an ensuing avalanche: Gohan’s father’s back from the dead, and then Gohan’s father’s old sparring buddy -- who, by the way, was one of the two aliens responsible for the East City Disaster, not that anyone thought it necessary to fill Videl in on the fact that the CEO of Capsule Corp _married a highly dangerous alien_ \-- joins in the fun, and then Gohan’s old mentor -- who, not to interrupt, is _literally King Piccolo’s kid, like literally the guy from Piccolo Day, like literally the dude in your history books -- _shows up, and all of Gohan’s other friends are there (hey, remember reading the Amenbo Island Disaster? Well, one of the androids survived --) and then there’s all this mess with Spopovitch and Yamu, and, well.

(Videl had her first Senzu Bean in the middle of all of it, which was a hell of an experience. The rush of endorphins is unlike anything else. Gohan had his first when he was six.

She also died in the middle of all of it, which is a hell of an experience of an entirely different sort. She’d still been reeling from the fact that some alien kid called himself God and lived in a tower at the ceiling of the world -- and, you know, the assumption that Gohan was dead. Nobody had thought to prepare Videl for the fact that the Judge and Executioner is a crabby old red guy behind a mahogany desk.)

So yeah, she’d been tending roses in heaven while Gohan had been training with the God above Gods with his dead father on some planet somewhere in space, yadda yadda yadda, planet got blown up, then it got brought back by a giant dragon on a different planet, and their calculus teacher insists that the midterm he’d scheduled for the day everyone got blown up was still going to happen at some point in the near future.

And somewhere along the way they had just, like, become a thing. Videl thought that proposals to go steady were supposed to involve class rings or letter jackets, but instead they involved it getting too late to go home after doing homework at his place, and wearing his old t-shirt to bed.

(_Yeah, Erasa, it’s not a hallucination_, she thinks, a little smug. He’s warm and hard and gentle, and he holds her like she was purpose-built to fit in his embrace.)

And high school goes on like that, homework and midterms and sitting on the rooftop laughing with Sharpner and Erasa and Gohan about inconsequential things, stealing mouthfuls of the rice pilaf Gohan’s mother makes for his lunch, him demonstrating an uncanny ability to eat entire sandwiches in one bite. Study dates, movie dates, double-dates. If he chafes a bit at the normalcy of it all, he settles into her life with his trademark ease.

Then, one Friday evening: “Hey, Videl?”

“Hm?”

“You busy tomorrow?”

She flits through her mental agenda. Her dad had scheduled an interview, and he always liked it when she was in the building when that happened -- but that wasn’t til next Saturday, probably. “Nah, why do you ask?”

“There are some people I want to introduce you to. -- Formally.”

She punches him in the arm. “I already met your parents, who else is there?”

“You remember the Namekians, Dende and Piccolo?”

* * *

And that’s how Videl ends up, breathless and sweaty from the flight and the altitude, sharing a breakfast with two (and a half) aliens. They drink only water, and the meal for Gohan and Videl is something they apparently cultivate on the Lookout themselves -- but the grain is rice-adjacent, and the vegetables kind of have the taste and texture of meat, and there’s a spice to everything that adds this weirdly perfect combination of heat and floral notes. It’s alien, it sure as hell is alien, but Videl’s stomach likes it, and she passes her compliments to the hosts.

“Oh, thank you,” the shorter Namekian -- Dende, an old friend of Gohan’s from a time when he, apparently, went off to fight an evil army in space -- says. “My attendant, Popo, does all of the gardening. He’ll be happy to know you enjoyed it.”

Dende seems nice, in an age-beyond-his-years kind of way. Popo, whom she met earlier, also seems nice -- had greeted them both at the edge of the Lookout, happily nattering on about how lovely it was to have so many guests these days, Lookout hasn’t been so lively in seven years. Piccolo, on the other hand, sips at his water sparingly and offers single-word responses to most questions.

Then, suddenly, Videl’s brain-to-mouth autopilot block fails, and she says “Oh! I know where I’ve seen your outfit!”

The conversation goes silent. Piccolo makes a motion with his face which, if he had any hair, would probably resemble raising an eyebrow.

“Er,” Videl says, “That is. I thought your outfit was familiar when I first saw it. Gohan, weren’t you wearing something similar during the Cell Games?”

There’s suddenly a very weird energy in the air, as though what she said had a bunch of hidden meaning, because Piccolo gets this fond look on his face, and Gohan grins like an idiot.

“Yeah, Piccolo made that for me.”

Here’s the thing about dating Gohan: you kind of have to accept that all sorts of random things are connected, with Gohan and his family at the centre. The CEO of Capsule Corp is dating one of the aggressors of the East City Disaster. The Red Ribbon Army made Cell to kill Gohan’s dad. King Piccolo was an alien who swore his kid would kill Gohan’s dad, but instead of doing any killing, the kid grew up to make outfits for Gohan.

And the fond, loving look on Piccolo’s face could melt a glacier, which reminds Videl that there’s still so much she’s going to learn about her boyfriend and his family.

“Yeah,” he repeats. “I made it for Gohan.”

* * *

“I spent a year with him after his father died,” Piccolo says, as Gohan and Dende and Popo inspect a water filtration system that has, for the past two months, been spitting out strawberry lemonade instead. “I thought I would toughen him up, but he…”

“...Changed you.”

“Hm.”

“He does that. It’s kind of -- scary.” You wake up one morning and he’s walked into your heart and made a little home there, scraped out a hole for himself by removing all sorts of bad stuff, made you a better person. “I don’t think he means to. You have to get him with his guard down.”

“Hm. That guard you sense -- it’s been with him his whole life. I couldn’t understand why, at first -- why have all this power, and not use it? -- But he’s a pacifist. Hates conflict.”

“Always trying to find a way around it.”

“And once I stopped seeing his strength as his only value, when I stopped seeing his pacifism as his defining characteristic…”

“I think.” Videl pauses, because she might be overstepping her boundaries here. “I think he gets that from his dad.”

“Perhaps.”

There’s a long silence between them. Gohan shouts that he thinks he’s found the source of the problem. Dende jumps with a joy unbecoming of a god.

“He never talks about Namek, or the Cell Games,” Videl says, finally. “I can’t imagine how terrible it must have been, going up against Cell not wanting to fight at all.”

“It was -- very hard, to stand by and watch.”

“He does talk about the year he spent with you, though.”

Piccolo turns to her. “Does he?”

“Yeah. Tells me that you would pretend to be all gruff, but that you’d find him apples and meat, and make sure his fire kept going all night. Says he thought of you as his -- guardian angel.”

(In Buu, as the strange laws of physics threatened to tear him back in two, Piccolo had dreamed of those days on the cliffs: the struggle he’d had, the fight he’d lost, to stop caring for his sworn enemy’s son.)

“...Is that so.”

Then Videl thinks about what she’d like to do to Gohan in return for making such a scary guy have a change of heart, and then consequently Videl learns that Namekians are telepaths because Piccolo and Dende’s antennae stand straight up and they both blush a bright, bright red, and then Gohan announces that he’s fixed the water purifier and hey, Dende, why are you blushing like that?

She’s still thinking about it when they get back to her place, just in time for her father to throw a fit about the interview she missed, and lunch is an array of bread and meat left over from a banquet he’d thrown the other night. Her father is so busy getting flustered at her for the way she’s changing -- “Used to be stuck to me at the hip, what’s happening to my little girl?” -- that he misses Gohan taking seconds, and thirds, and fourths, so really it’s a win for everyone.

“I’m glad you liked them,” Gohan says later that evening, as he tucks Videl into his arms. “They’re both very important to me.”

What Videl wants to say is, _that was all you, you idiot. You made all of us into people who could like each other_, but instead she says, “Piccolo seems really nice.”

“Dad says he wasn’t always like that.”

“I can’t imagine.”

She’s only half-joking, but Gohan takes it as the truth, and he sighs happily and holds her tight and closes his eyes. Videl makes a mental note that she should probably talk to Bulma before she goes and asks Gohan for any of _that_, since he’s even more jacked than Eresa ever could have imagined, and it definitely isn’t just for show. Ask her what it was like having a kid with an alien, because maybe Videl isn’t entirely turned off by the idea of having a kid with an alien, and you don’t fall in love with Gohan without falling in love with all his friends and family.

But that’s a job for tomorrow’s Videl. Tonight’s Videl snuggles in a little tighter, and surrenders to the night.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://kanthia.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
